Summary: The Pirate Bay is down. Wikileaks is down. Visa was down. Are all these Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks a coincidence? Right now it’s not clear, but something is definitely happening.

After covering The Pirate Bay Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack and Anonymous’ denial of responsibility for it, I’ve been checking the torrent site’s Facebook Page every so often. The Pirate Bay said it thought it might know who was behind the attack, so I was curious if they would post it today. They haven’t yet, but they did just post this:

Wikileaks.org is also under attack.
This sure is the year of the storm…
As predicted here: https://thepiratebay.se/blog/204

I checked, and indeed Wikileaks is down for me. The site’s Twitter account sent this message out five hours ago: “WikiLeaks has been under sustained DDOS attacks over the last 72 hours. http://www.wikileaks.org is good, http://wikileaks.org is flooded.”

At the time of writing, Down for everyone or just me confirms it: “It’s not just you! http://wikileaks.org looks down from here.” As you can see in the screenshot above, Is it down right now agrees as well: “Wikileaks.org is DOWN for everyone. It is not just you. The server is not responding…”

While looking around for more information about the Wikileaks attack, I happened to stumble on this message from LulzPirate, which has 32,900 followers: “TANGO DOWN: http://Visa.com – Enjoy! #UG #WikiLeaks.” I saw it just a few minutes after it was posted.

I tried going to visa.com and indeed it failed. I couldn’t believe my eyes as I read the “Service Unavailable” message.

I checked Down for everyone or just me and was given this message: “It’s not just you! http://visa.com looks down from here.” A few refreshes later, I got: “It’s just you. http://visa.com is up.”

Phew, okay so two out of three. The Visa attack was clearly just a temporarily blip, and not another massive DDoS attack like Wikileaks and The Pirate Pay seem to be experiencing. What a day.

It seems to me that the fact both The Pirate Bay and Wikileaks are down due to a DDoS attack is no coincidence. We’re not talking about a few minutes here or even a few hours, we’re talking about days of outage.

It takes a considerable number of computers and connections, not to mention effort and skill, to conduct one such attack, let alone two. The two could be unrelated, but right now I’m finding that very hard to believe. Either way, the question remains: who could be behind these attacks?